Social Movements and Collective Behavior in Premodern polities*
Pomo Bole Maru Big Head Dance, Indigenous Northern California
Christopher
Chase-Dunn
An earlier version was presented at the annual
meeting of the American Sociological Association, Seattle, Washington, August
22, 2016 Regular Session on Social Movements
Institute for Research
on World-Systems
University
of California-Riverside
Draft v. 9-21-16; 8245 words
This
is IROWS Working Paper #110 available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows110/irows110.htm
This is a draft of Chapter 2 of Paul
Almeida and C. Chase-Dunn, Global Change
and Social Movements forthcoming
from Johns Hopkins University Press.
*Thanks
to E.N. Anderson and Bob Edwards for helpful suggestions.
Abstract: This paper contends
that collective behavior and social movements have been important drivers of
social change since the emergence of human language. Migrations to new
locations were usually motivated by population density and competition for
resources, but departure events and many other group decisions were legitimated in terms of ideological formulations
and disagreements. The emergence of larger-scale leadership, hierarchical
kinship and class formation were often legitimated in terms of discourses about
authority, connections with ancestors and disputes about origin myths or the
correct performance of rituals. Evidence of collective behavior and social movements
among hunter-gatherers is described, and premodern movements known from
historical accounts are recounted. The similarities and differences between
social movements in small scale systems and in larger state-based systems are delineated.
Social movements have
long been studied as instances of what sociologists have called collective
behavior (Blumer 1951; Smelser
1962). Collective behavior is understood to consist of non-institutionalized and
somewhat spontaneous actions by human individuals and groups, such as crowds,
riots, revolts, revolutions, fads and etc. Most
social scientists who study social movements think of them as a modern
phenomenon, but some historical ethnographers (e.g. Spier
1935; Wallace 1956; Laurence 1964) have
noted that premodern small-scale polities[1]
also reveal instances of collective behavior that seem rather similar in many
ways to the processes and patterns exhibited by modern social movements. Neil Smelser’s (1962) general theoretical approach contends that
collective behavior and social movements emerge when existing social
institutions are doing a poor job of meeting peoples’ needs and expectations
and that social movements are important agents of social change. This approach is easily extended to premodern
polities, and suggests that collective behavior and social movements have been
important causes of the evolution of social institutions since the Stone Age.[2]
Most
sociological theories see religions as mainstays of social structure and
stability. Institutionalized moral orders, assumptions about what exists and
what is right, are pillars that produce stable expectations and that reinforce
other institutions. Emile Durkheim (1915) described religions as projections of
social structure on the sky (see also Swanson 1960). Egalitarian polities projected beings who had
powers, but also quirks and faults, while many hierarchical polities project
and worship a single omniscient and omnipotent god of the universe.
But religious ideas have also been recurrent
matters of contestation. Religions, even animistic belief systems, are
discourses about authority that are often in dispute. Disagreements about creation
myths or the correct performances of rituals have often been the ideological forms
used to mobilize collective action in both modern and premodern human polities. Projections on the
sky may be used to defend older social structures or to propose and justify new
ones. And indeed, despite the emergence of secular humanism, religious
identities and doctrines continue to be the basis of much hegemonic and
counter-hegemonic contestation and mobilization in the contemporary world. Some
social movement theorists have tended to ignore “primitive” social movements
that are motivated by religious ideologies or that do not utilize modern
repertoires of contention in order to focus only on “modern” secular movements.
These latter are more likely to employ frames based on secular humanism and
legitimation of authority from below (popular sovereignty). But this approach obliterates prehension of the role that social movements have played in
sociocultural evolution and occludes the analysis of those contemporary social
movements that still employ religious ideologies and not so civil modes of
contention.
Globalization remains a contested
concept in both popular discourse and in social science. We propose to distinguish
between: 1. globalization as the spatial
expansion and deepening of human interaction networks and, 2. the “globalization project” that has emerged
since the 1970s as a hegemonic discourse about deregulation, privatization and
austerity (Chase-Dunn 2006).
Globalization understood as the expansion and intensification of spatial
interaction networks has been going on since modern humans migrated out of
Africa to occupy the other continents (Modelski, Devezas
and Thompson 2008; Chase-Dunn and Lerro
2014; Jennings 2010 ). This paper
discusses the roles that social movements have played in social change in
hunter-gatherer bands, world-systems of sedentary foragers and in the processes
of class formation and state formation that occurred in several different world
regions. We propose that the social movements have been an important aspect of
the processes that have driven the expansion and intensification of human
interaction networks since the Stone Age.
David Snow and Sarah Soule’s
(2010:6-7) primer on social movements defines them as “collectivities[3]
acting with some degree of organization
and continuity, partly outside institutional or organizational channels, for
the purpose of challenging extant systems of authority, or resisting change in such systems, in the organization, polity,
culture, or world system in which they are embedded.” This definition is
sufficiently flexible to allow for its application to premodern settings in
which authority structures were less hierarchical and organizational forms were
less bureaucratic. All human polities have had some kinds of authority and some
kinds of organization. But, though authority
in small-scale polities is less centralized and has less power, contentious disagreements
and disputes still occurred and people mobilized one another to address these.
Emigration by groups (hiving off) was an important outcome of disagreements as
well as a response to population pressure. Decisions to leave were often framed
in terms disagreements about the moral order or appropriate ritualized
behavior. Formal authority structures that are centralized provide a clear and
convenient target for protests. So social movements in hierarchical polities
are more easily focused on the symbols and structures of power once these are
institutionally defined. As formal organizational forms emerged, social
movements were able to utilize these as both targets of protest and as
instruments for coordinating participants, increasing the scale and
effectiveness of the movements. And new and better technologies of
communication and transportation were also used by movements. These changes in scale and effectiveness are
why most social movement theorists define movements as a modern phenomenon, but
the less organized, more spontaneous, forms of collective behavior that were
frequent events in premodern polities also had important effects on regime
change and the development of new techniques of power.
Social movement theorists have also
usually assumed that movements come from below and target those above.
Consideration of how movements might have operated in egalitarian polities
makes this assumption problematic, but we contend that it is an assumption that
should be more generally questioned.
Social movement research has long confirmed that leaders of the masses
are more likely to have origins and resources that allow them the opportunities
to mobilize. The poorest and most down-trodden rarely have the resources that
are needed. So leaders of movements tend to be at least from the middle
classes. But it is also important to note that elites often sponsor and lead
social movements. The literature on
state collapse notes that revolutions tend to happen when elites are in contention
with one another. Elites are undoubtedly more likely to utilize
institutionalized forms of power because they have greater access to these. And this is one reason why social movement
theorists tend to assume that movements come from below. But the activities of
some elites seeking to mobilize public opinion and to influence the course of
history often take forms that are very similar to social movements from below. They may seek only to mobilize other elites or
they may mobilize the masses. Either
way, these efforts often take on aspects of collective behavior and need to be
included in order for us to analyze how movements have caused social change.
Collective
Behavior in Small-scale Polities
The sources of evidence about
collective behavior processes and premodern social movements in small scale [4]
polities is mostly indirect. We know that humans began burying their dead about
100,000 years ago. Beads appeared in Southern Africa about 70,000 years ago (Klein
and Edgar 2002) and dramatic cave
paintings in Europe are about 50,000 years old. Despite that humans only
arrived in the Americas about 15,000 years ago there is conclusive evidence
that nomadic hunter-gatherers were gathering together to build monumental
mounds in the Mississippi drainage as early as 5500 BCE (Watson Brake) (Saunders
et al 2005) with elaborate and rather
large scale mound complexes appearing between 1650 and 700 BCE at Poverty Point (Sassaman 2005).
Nomadic and sedentary hunter-gatherers are
known ethnographically and the cave paintings of some of these are associated
with ritual activities. The Chumash were sedentary
foragers who lived along the Southern California coast in what is now Santa
Barbara and Ventura Counties. They built and used a distinctive plank canoe (tomol) that allowed them
to fish offshore and to develop a trade network that linked those living on the
Northern Channel Islands with the villages on the mainland (Arnold 2004). The large coastal villages were also
connected by trade in food items with smaller inland villages in the mountains
and valleys adjacent to the coast (Gamble 2008). The dramatic cave
paintings in the territory of the ethnographically known Chumash are thought to
have been associated with the ‘antap cult, a secret organization of elites who taught
esoteric astronomical knowledge and utilized mind-altering toloache
(jimson weed) to gain access to the spirit world (Johnson nd;
Romani 1981; Hudson 1981). Chumash polities were in transition from the more
typical egalitarian social structure of other California village-living
hunter-gatherers toward class formation. The ‘antap
cult was a manifestation of this transition in which the emergent elites from
autonomous polities demonstrated their superiority over non-elites by carrying
out exclusive ritual performances behind visual outdoor barriers or in isolated
remote locations such as Painted Cave, so that commoners could not see them
(Hudson 1981).
Painted Cave near Santa Barbara
Ethnographers
studying Northern California indigenous polities also observed cults (White Deer among the Hupa, Hesi, Kuksu and Waisaltu among the Patwin, as
well as the Bole-Maru and Bole-Hesi)
in which songs and dances were spread from group to group by moral
entrepreneurs and messingers (Halpern 1988). The most
closely studied instance of this phenomenon is the 1870 Ghost Dance. The 1870 Ghost Dance was an earlier version of
the more famous 1890 Ghost Dance studied by James Mooney 1965 [1896] and many
others (e.g. Wallace 1956;Thornton 1981; Smoak 2006). The 1890 ghost dance supposedly originated
when god spoke to Wovoka (Jack Wilson) while he was alone in the woods near the
Walker River cutting logs. Wovoka became the Paiute messiah who spread the word
from Nevada to many other tribes in the West. But it was Jack Wilson’s uncle
who had spread a very similar doctrine 20 years earlier. Wovoka’s word spread
east, exciting the Lakota and other tribes to don ghost shirts that were
supposed to repel bullets. The ensuing rebellion led to the tragic massacre at
Wounded Knee (Mooney 1965; Fenelon 1998: Chapter 5).
The 1870 Ghost Dance was
studied by Cora DuBois 2007 [1939]. She interviewed surviving participants and
observers of this movement as it spread from the Nevada Paiutes near Walker
Lake across Northern and Central California and Southern Oregon (see also Spier 1927 and Gayton 1930). The most
prevalent formulation of the Ghost Dance doctrine was that all the dead Indians
were going to return to Earth and the whites would die. DuBois was told that
the Ghost Dance doctrine predicted that all the dead Indians since the beginning of time were returning, coming
up from the south, and they would wreak a grim vengeance on the whites.[5]
Half-breeds would turn into rocks. Non-believers would turn into rotten logs.
And the future would be a happy world of abundance and restored nature in which
sickness and death did not occur. [6]
Arapahoe ghost shirt
Moral
entrepreneurs carried the “hurry up word” that the Indians should come together
with certain costumes and songs and dances in order to facilitate the return of
their dead loved ones.
Arapahoe Ghost Shirt
DuBois
tracked the spread and morphological changes of the 1870 Ghost Dance and
analyzed why some groups embraced the new cult while others rejected it. The messengers
were “dream doctors” who used horses and wagons to travel to the homelands of
other tribes in order to teach the dances and songs and spread the word. Most
of the indigenes still did not know how to read or write and so the dream
doctors were reliant on oral communication to spread the ideas of the ghost
dance.[7] The acceptors were those groups that had been
most disrupted by the arrival of the Euroamericans.
The rejecters were less disrupted and the authority of the traditional shamans [8] was more
intact. The traditional shamans regions that were more remote, and so less disrupted,
were able to convince their co-villagers to reject the ghost dance. The local entrepreneurs mixed ideas
from the Paiute ghost dance with older cults such as the Kuksu to produce new hybrids such
as the Bole Maru (Big
Head) dance. And so the form of the rituals became modified as they
traveled.
The
Ghost Dance ideology involved elements that were quite distinct
Arapahoe Ghost Shirt
from
earlier ritual practices and ideas, and some of these may have been due to the
influence of non-indigenous
ideologies
and practices. Women and children were usually not allowed to participate in
the older “dangerous” invocations of spiritual power, whereas they were allowed
and encouraged to attend the ghost dances. The previous indigenous beliefs of most California Indians
included a fear of the spirits of the dead and careful efforts to insure their
journey to a distant and separate realm. The idea that the dead would come back
was blasphemy to many of the traditional shamans. Some of the dream doctors who
took the word on the road were also economic entrepreneurs who instructed
dancers to bring their valuables to the ceremonies to contribute to the cause,
and who sold
ritual paraphernalia such as chicken-feather capes and charged admission to the
performances. In some cases the ideas of the ghost dance were remixed with the
older cult ideas, producing local variations. And the ghost dance ideas were
appropriated and further transmitted by local enthusiasts.[9]
One
problem with the study of movements that are ethnographically known is that
they usually occurred in a context in which indigenous life was being radically
altered and threatened by the processes of colonial integration into the
expanding modern world-system and so it is difficult to know which elements of
the movements were characteristics of precontact polities
and which were borrowed from the invading culture. The millenarian aspect of the Ghost Dance,
which was a “hurry up word” in which the old world was coming to an end and a
new world was coming in to being, is often thought to have been such a borrowing
from eschatological Christianity. Norman
Cohn (1970, 1993) contends that millenarianism did not exist before its
emergence with Zoroastrianism and then it spread to Judaism and Christianity. But it is entirely possible that most human polities
contain the cultural tropes of a stable cosmos versus an immanent radical transformation. The five suns of
Mesoamerican religion and related ideas known among village-living
hunter-gatherers of indigenous California suggest that the notion radical
cosmological transition was not uniquely invented by Zoroaster. Millenarianism is a powerful trope for
mobilizing collective action, that continues to play an important role in 21st
century social movements (Lindholm
and Zuquete 2010). It may be far older and more
widespread than Cohn contends. Many human cultures probably contain both notions
of eternal order and of imminent transformation.
AFC Wallace’s (1956) depiction of
the1890 Ghost Dance and cargo cults[10] as
“revitalization movements” focusses on the ways in which these nativist movements
were adaptive responses to the colonial disruption of indigenous cultures that
mixed older institutional forms with new elements inspired by contact with the
expanding Europe-centered world-system. Cora Dubois’s (2007:116) take on this
is less functionalist, but more interesting. Discussing the effects of
Christian ideas on the ideology of the dream doctors she says “… it mirrors the accumulating
despair of the Indians and their realization that there was no room for them in
the new social order. Christian beliefs, which were an outgrowth of a not
dissimilar cultural situation, offered a ready-made escape into supernaturalism
from realities that had become intolerable because they offered nothing but
defeat.” In other words, there was a useful congruence between the ideology of
salvation that emerged from an Iron Age Roman colony in Palestine and the
situation of indigenous peoples of the Americas.[11]
Wallace also surmises that James Mooney’s sympathy with the American indigenes
was partly due to his support for Irish national independence from British
colonialism (Wallace 1965:vi).
There
is evidence that the 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dances were a later reincarnation of
an earlier Prophet Dance that had emerged among the plateau and coastal groups
in British Columbia and Washington (Spier 1935).[12] Spier demonstrated
many similarities between the prophet dance complex that emerged in the early
decades of the 19th century with the Ghost Dance doctrines and
practices that emerged in the 1870s and the 1890s. He contended that the
prophet dance complex was not caused by the disruption of indigenous societies
by the arrival of the Europeans. Suttles (1987) agrees
and proposes that the prophet dance, in which dream doctors proselytized[13]
across a wide area based on dances and songs they had learned by visiting the
land of the dead, was a response to the need of indigenous polities for larger
scale political leadership. This is an importance instance in which a
millenarian social movement is connected with the emergence of new and larger
scale forms of authority.
Cargo cults
were Melanesian millenarian movements encompassing a diverse range of
practices and that occurred in the wake of contact with the commercial networks
of colonizing European polities. The name derives from the belief that various
ritualistic acts will lead to a bestowing of material wealth
("cargo"). Worsley
(1968) saw the millenarianism of the cargo cults as having been borrowed from
Christian missionaries, whereas Lawrence (1964) contended that millenarianism
was part of the precontact Melanesian culture.
Chiefdoms experienced a rise and fall pattern that was somewhat similar in
form to that of larger states and empires (Anderson 1994). Some of the rises
were the result of conquest by semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms, but others may
have been the outcome of a demographic process somewhat similar to the ”secular
cycles” described for state-based systems by Jack Goldstone (1991) and Peter
Turchin and Sergey Nefedov (2009). Turchin
and Nefedov formalized Jack Goldstone’s (1991) model of the secular cycle, an
approximately 200 year long demographic cycle, in which population grows and
then decreases. Population pressures emerge because the number of mouths to be
fed and the size of the group of elites get too large for the resource base,
causing conflict and the disruption of the polity. Turchin and Nefedov test their model on a number of agrarian empires,
confirming the principle that population growth and elite overproduction leads
to sociopolitical instability within states. However, we think that somewhat
similar processes may have been operating within chiefdom polities.
The main differences
between social movements in small-scale polities and those that occur in larger
and more complex polities is the social structural context itself. As mentioned
above, small-scale human polities were fiercely egalitarian. They suppressed
aggrandizing behavior by alpha males, minimized the inheritance of wealth by
burying or burning personal possessions at death and redistributed use rights
to natural resources based on need (Flannery and Marcus 2012; Turchin 2016: Chapter 5). Decisions were made by consensus
in discussions that included all adults. The social movement literature tends
to assume that hierarchy exists and that social movements challenge
hierarchical authorities. When there is little or no hierarchy, how is
collective action mobilized?. The example of the 1870 Ghost Dance provides the
answer. Charismatic bearers of new songs and dances and visions of
transformation (dream doctors) challenged the ideas and ritual practices of
older authorities (sucking doctors) and mobilized action around the new ideas.
Even in small-scale egalitarian polities there were some authorities and there
were taken-for-granted practices and ideas that could be challenged. In the
case of the revitalization movements these were adaptive changes to the larger
colonial situation. It is likely that other reorganizations were similarly
implemented by religious social movements.
Theocratic Early State Formation
The emergence
of socially constructed hierarchy had to overcome great resistance. There is
considerable evidence that hierarchies emerged during periods of warfare and
internal strife in which people were motivated to accept the claims of
superiority of a chiefly class or a charismatic leader who was able to promise
(and deliver) better security. Fatigue
from insecurity plus circumscription (the lack of feasible emigration
destinations) (Carneiro 1970, 1978) lowered the resistance
of the people to claims of superiority on the part of emergent elites. These new elites usually legitimated their
actions in terms of reformulated religious ideologies and they used these to
mobilize collective labor toward both monumental and productive projects. As
interaction networks and polities got larger and more complex, collective
behavior and social movements took forms that were more recognizable by students of modern
collective behavior.
Most studies of the emergence of
early states depict a situation in which religion played an important role in
the establishment of a layer of authority over the top of existing kinship
structures. Stephen Lekson (1999) contends that the
rise of a relatively large polity with monumental architecture at Chaco Canyon
( in what is now Northwestern New Mexico) was organized by a religious elite
using astronomical ideas (indicated by the ritual roads centered on the biggest
edifice (Pueblo Bonito) in the canyon). The settlement at Chaco Canyon was
largely abandoned in the twelfth century CE and most archaeologists ascribe
this to climate change (reduced rainfall and catastrophic floods that lowered
the water table by washing out a deep arroyo (e.g. Fagan 1991). Lekson contends
that the Chaco priests led a large group to establish another central place directly
north of Chaco (Aztec Ruin near the Animas River) and then, after another
flooding episode that destroyed an irrigation system, led a third migration to establish Paquimé (Casas Grandes) directly south of both Chaco
Canyon and the Aztec Ruin settlement. If Lekson is
correct Chaco elites were employing an astronomical ideology to mobilize their
populations to adapt to ecological and climatic conditions by relocating and
developing more resilient forms of irrigation.
The Chaco Meridian
Timothy Pauketat (2009) presents
a thorough overview of the archaeological evidence that has accrued regarding
the rise of Cahokia and the Mississippian culture complex of which it was an
important center (see also Mann 2005). Pauketat contends that the construction of this large
settlement in the American Bottom (now East St. Louis) was organized by
religious entrepreneurs who created a dramaturgical set of monuments organized
around a religious ideology that attracted large numbers of immigrants and
legitimated the mobilization of a huge investment of human labor time in the
building of the dramatic monuments. Some archaeologists prefer to consider
Cahokia to have been a complex chiefdom rather than an early state. But the
archaeological evidence of large-scale human sacrifice favors the idea that
this was indeed a state.[14]
Mound 72 contained the remains of fifty-three decapitated young women,
apparently appropriated from poorer families in outlying villages, who seem to
have been honored to join a recently deceased king in the afterworld (Pauketat 2009:133-4).
Cahokia (East St. Louis)
In the Uruk or Late Chalcolithic period
(4000-3100 BCE) the first true city (Uruk) grew
up on the floodplain of lower Mesopotamia, and other cities of similar large
size soon emerged in adjacent locations. This was the original birth of
“civilization” understood as the combination of irrigated agriculture, writing,
cities and states. The main architectural feature of these new Sumerian cities was
the temple and this structure has long been considered the primary institution
of a theocratically organized political
economy. Later evidence about Sumerian civilization shows that each
city was represented by a god in the Sumerian pantheon and the priests and
populace were defined as the slaves of the city god – this justifying the
accumulation of surplus product and the mobilization of human labor for building
monumental architecture (Postgate
1992). The Sumerian cities erected their states –specialized
institutions of regional control – over the tops of kin-based normative
institutions (Zagarell 1986). Assemblies of lineage
heads long continued to play an important role in the politics of Mesopotamia
(Van de Mieroop 1999). One interesting difference
between the emergences of archaic states in Mesopotamia from other instances of
pristine state formation is the apparent absence of ritual human sacrifice. A
powerful way to dramatize the power of a king is to bury a lot of other people
with him when he dies. Except for the Third Dynasty of Ur period (the royal
cemetery at Ur), there is little evidence of ritual human sacrifice in
Mesopotamia. The temple economy required contributions of goods and
labor time, including animal sacrifices that were consumed in religious
feasts. But the sacrifice of humans in Mesopotamia, as with modern
states, was mainly confined to killing in battle.
Mesopotamian Ziggurat
(temple)
Revolutions in the Ancient World
Jack
A. Goldstone (2014: Chapter 4) devoted a chapter of his Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction to “Revolutions in the
Ancient World.” We have much better evidence regarding social movements once polities
had developed the ability to record events in writing. The rise of primary or pristine states
occurred in at least five largely unconnected world regions: Mesopotamia,
Egypt, the Indus River Valley, the
Yellow River Valley, the Andes and
Mesoamerica. This is a dramatic case of parallel sociocultural evolution in
which somewhat similar conditions led to the emergence of large settlements and
large polities. In all these cases food production techniques, mainly
irrigation, domestication of animals, and the application of the plow, had
developed to make possible the feeding of large numbers of people living close
together in large cities. The cases of Cahokia and Mesopotamia discussed above are
instances of this kind.
Research
on scale changes in the population sizes of cities and territorial sizes of
polities shows that around half of the cases of upward sweeps in these size
indicators were the result of conquests by non-core marcher states (Inoue, et al 2016). This confirms our
hypothesis that core/periphery relations and uneven development are important
for explaining the emergence of complexity and hierarchy in world-systems, but
it also shows that a significant portion of upsweeps were not associated with
the actions of non-core marcher states. We are developing a multilevel model
(Chase-Dunn and Inoue 2017) that combines interpolity dynamics with the
“secular cycle” model developed by Turchin and Nefadov (2009). This model will include social movement
mobilization and revolutions along with demographic and economic variables.
Goldstone’s chapter is useful because it suggests that his demographic model of
state collapse (formalized by Turchin and Nefadov 2009 as a “secular cycle”) can be applied to
chiefdoms and early states as well as classical and modern ones. Goldstone’s
earliest case of revolution is during and after the reign of Pepy II, the last pharaoh of Old Kingdom Egypt whose reign
ended during the 22nd century BCE. The power of the central
government was being challenged by regional nomes who
were building large funerary monuments to themselves in what Van der Mieroop (2001:xxx) describes as the “democratization of the
afterlife” because the local leaders were presuming to join the pharaoh in the
glorious next world. Social order was breaking down. The poor displayed little
regard for those of rank.
Goldstone also describes the social movements
and revolutions known from the classical Greek and Roman worlds. Here there is
much more documentary and literary evidence describing the processes of social
movements and revolutions. Goldstone recounts the unsuccessful struggles of the
Gracchus brothers in Republican Rome to protect the interests of farmers
against the acquisition of large plantations by slave-owning latifundistas (Brunt 1971). Peasants revolts, slave
revolts, urban food riots, attacks by pastoral nomads, bandits, pirates,
internecine struggles among elites occurred repeatedly in the context of the
rise and fall of regimes and of empires in the ancient and classical
world-systems. Turchin (2003: Chapter 9) notes the
relevance of Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical model of the rise
and fall of regimes and the importance of changing levels of asabiyah (loyalty,
solidarity and group feeling) as old regimes became decadent and new
challengers emerged from the desert to form new regimes (see also Amin 1980; Chase-Dunn
and Anderson 2005).
The rise of the world religions[15]
during and after the axial age display the
interaction between social movements and forms of governance. World
religions in our sense separate the moral order from kinship, allowing for and
encouraging the inclusion of non-kin into the circle of protection. This is the
expansion of human rights beyond the bounds of kinship and the expansion of what Peter Turchin (2016) calls “Ultrasociety”
– altruistic behavior among non-kin. Marvin
Harris (1977) pointed to the frequency of ritual cannibalism practiced on
enemies in systems of small scale polities. In small systems non-kin are not
really humans. They are enemy others that are not due any positive reciprocity
(Sahlins 1972). The question of who are humans and who are not
the humans is important in all cultures. In small-scale polities the
distinction between “the people” and the non-people is usually a mixture of
kinship relations and familiarity with a language. The moral order applies to
the circle of the people and heavy othering sees the non-people as animals or
enemies. When world-systems expanded important debates occurred as to whether
newly encountered peoples had souls, or not. The rise of what we currently call
humanity was a long slow, back and forth and uneven process that continues in
the current struggle over citizenship.
World religions locate great agency in the
individual person even if it is only the right to declare obedience. To become a member of the moral order a
convert must herself confess and proclaim belief in the godhead. This is the
act of an individual person. One’s own action is required. Non-world religions
usually tie membership to one’s birth parents. Salvation is also a further
democratization of the afterlife. Now
the masses too may go to heaven or become enlightened.
Harris contends that the rise of world
religions was functional for expanding empires because they included the conquered populations within the
moral order of the conquerors. This proscribed cannibalism and reduced the
amount of resistance mounted by prospective conquerees.
The king makes you pay tribute and taxes but he will not eat you. Most world
religions began as social movements from the semiperiphery or the periphery
(Bactria, Palestine) that were eventually adopted by the emperors. Prophets and
charismatic leaders mobilized cadres who spread the word orally and with
written documents. Sects and communities of believers were organized,
eventually producing formally structure churches. Older institutions resisted,
often repressing the new movements, but they continue to spread, in some cases
becoming conquering armies, and in other cases becoming adopted by kings and
emperors. Some of the world religions
were monotheistic, but others had no godhead at all except the path to
enlightenment.
There is a well-developed and convincing literature
on early Christianity as a social movement (Blasi
1988; Mitchell, Young and Bowie 2006). The interesting thing already mentioned
is world-systemic context of the origin of the movement. Christ and his
followers emerged in a context of a powerful Roman colonialism in which the
colonized peoples were faced with overwhelming force. The ideology of
individual salvation and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s with
concentration on the rewards of life after death was powerful medicine for
those who faced a mighty Roman imperialism. Paul’s mission to other colonized
peoples and the delinking of salvation from ethnic origin was a recipe that
allowed the movement to spread back to the poor peoples of the core. And
eventually it was adopted by the Roman emperors themselves as a universalistic
ideology that could serve as legitimation for a multi-ethnic empire. The prince
of peace and salvation ironically proved to be a fine motivator for later
imperial projects such as the reconquest of Spain
from the Moors and the conquest of Mesoamerica and the Andes (Padden 1970). And as Cora Dubois (2007:116)
has said,
it also worked for the conquered as a way for them to survive psychologically
and to adapt to a world in which their indigenous lifeways were coming to an
end. Recall the discussion of “revitalization movements” above.[16]
Hinduism and Confucianism are not very
proselytizing but they both spread successfully because they provided a new
justification for hierarchy and state-formation. The spread of Hinduism to mainland and island
Southeast Asia occurred because its notion of the god-king (deva-raja) provided
a useful ideology for the centralization of state power in a context of smaller
contending polities (Wheatley 1975). Confucianism provided a different
justification for state power based on the notion of the mandate of heaven and
it spread from its original heartland to the rest of China and Korea.
So what
were the similarities and differences between social movements in small scale
polities and those that occurred in larger-scale chiefdoms and states? As we
have already said, the biggest differences were in the social structural
contexts. In egalitarian polities authority
was more diffuse. But it still existed and movements could define themselves as
revised versions of authority such as occurred in the contest between the traditional
shamans and the dream doctors. The diffusion of new ideas was constrained by
modes of transportation and by simple technologies of communication in systems
of small scale polities. The new words, songs, dances had to be carried on
foot. This was a limitation on how far and fast the ideas could spread. In
multilingual situations the signal to noise ratio was low as the original ideas
were lost in translation. This could be seen in the mixing of the ghost dance
ideas with other, earlier, cult forms. Down-the-line transmission of
information also adds noise. Sign languages were also in use in indigenous
North America (Davis 2010), but these were not good media for transmitting the
subtleties of new cult ideas (Mooney 1965: 19). Obviously the invention of
writing and literacy increased the signal to noise ratio and allowed ideas to
spread much faster and farther, not to mention the telegraph the radio and the
internet. New “religions of the book” transformed rituals of the spoken word
into worship of the text.
Boat and
caravan transportation facilitated the more rapid and distant spread of ideas.
Institutions such as money and the law emerged in part as efforts to control
social movements from below, but they could also be used by social movements.
The same goes for economic and military organization. Bureaucracies and formal
organizations were usually created to reproduce social orders, but social
movements could also appropriate these inventions and use them to mobilize
social change.
In the modern world-system there has been a
spiral of interaction between world revolutions and the evolution of global
governance that we will discuss in the next chapter. World revolutions are
periods in world history in which a large number of rebellions break out across
the world- system, often unconnected with one another, but known, and responded
to, by imperial authorities. Since the protestant reformation such
constellations of social movements have played an important role in the
evolution of global governance because the powers that can best handle
collective behavior challenges are the ones who succeed in competition with
competing elites. It is possible that similar phenomena existed in premodern
world-systems. Oscillations in the expansion of trade networks, the rise and
fall of chiefdoms, states and empires, and increasing synchronization of trade
and political cycles may have been connected with waves of social movements.
This is a hypothesis that we have only begun to think.
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